Samsung Unrolls Flex Display Contest

The Korean giant will pay up to $10,000 for the best business plan based on its upcoming flexible display technology -- though specs of the displays are unclear.

Samsung launched a contest of sorts at the very hip Parisoma shared workspace in San Francisco around the future of mobile and its upcoming flexible display technology. In a retro move, they gave out details on old school 3M transparencies -- funny, but impossible to read.

This is a business plan contest, not the kind of design contest we know and love in electronics. You will not get your hands on a flexible display from Samsung Device and will probably have to guess most of its technical specs.

Samsung is, however, giving out three cash prizes -- $10,000, $5,000, and $2,500 -- and they will give the winners technical support. It may even fund your idea, so the contest might be worth a shot if you are creative.

My take is that a lot of Internet of Things devices will need bendable, foldable, and flexible displays because they are going where a traditional rigid display hasn't gone before. Samsung previously announced this technology at CES in January. Its name is YOUM, and you can see some demos here.

The contest clearly has Samsung corporate attention. Speaking on a panel at the event were Shankar Chandran, head of Samsung Catalyst Fund, a $100M fund focused on early and seed stage investments; and Jim Schuessler, director of mobile platform architecture at the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center.

I think the reason for having this in a gritty San Francisco shared workspace was to attract non-traditional electronics and systems designers, but I am skeptical if that was the right approach. Interestingly, they are hiring designers, so the event did double duty for the Samsung Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, and may explain why we were on 11th and Howard in San Francisco (nice move).

The general requirements of the contest are that a flexible display is a key part of a product that is feasible and has clearly articulated time and cost assumptions. Samsung said its flexible displays will come in several forms, range from one to 20 inches in size, and support up to 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution. The details of the contest are here.

I think the hardest part of the contest is the business model and volume assumptions, but if you get picked and Samsung gets behind you, big things could happen. They could happen quickly, too. The application period opens August 29 and ends September 15. So why not dream a little and figure out that IoT killer app that couldn't be realized without a flexible display?

This is one way of crowdsourcing. A $10k prize money may not be as attractive as potentially launching a business of your own with a giant backer. It is definitely worth an attempt to enterpreneurs.

To Samsung, the investment is low. The return will be big because of all the submitted ideas. The ideas might be applicable to elsewhere. In addition to ideas, Samsung will certainly gather a pool of talents. The contest is definitely a win-win.

The idea is pretty good but I wonder if people retain the rights to their ideas in this situation. Especially the ones who don't receive backing from samsung. I haven't read the fine print, but it seems like many people would be scared to submit their idead out of fear that samsung will take it

I would have thought Samsung would make it a condition of the competition that it would be free to commercialize any device idea thrown up if it saw fit and that entrants rights with regard to idea would pass to Samsung.

Isn't that why they are holding the competition and handing out the prize money?

They are not doing it for altruistic reasons.

Surely is similar model to X-factor, American Idol.....you offer a prize to incentivize entrants and make it a condition that winners sign with the organizer to go to market.

The key factor with rollable displays is what is the tightest radius of curvature achievable before delaminating transparent electrodes used for display definiton.

Which is one reason there are none...only the vaguely bendable ones in Samsung's first class.

For my part, this only confirms that Samsung's YOUM display is pure techno-push, and that they haven't found no killer application yet.

Their display is too expensive for use in mainstream phones, so they want a high added-value application to ramp-up volumes and lower costs; this is a smart move. Nevertheless I doubt they will find market traction at short or mid term for their foldable displays.